Often in the media, certain ideas are repeated and reinforced so frequently that we forget they are merely just someone’s ideas at all and start to take them as fact. This is true for all forms of media, however newspapers are especially guilty of pushing ideologies as facts because they are supposed to be a source of information and education, however can they be trusted on all subjects?
In this picture we can see a few headlines that all relate to migrants coming to the UK. As we can see, the overall tone set by these headlines is negative as they all try to portray the migrants as something to be feared; they represent them as a threat, despite the reality of the situation.
One of the reasons they do this is because they know that sensationalism will sell more papers, so rather than just printing a statistic about the amount of migrants in the country they would rather print a story about how ‘dangerous and scary’ they can be. By doing this they immediately make their credibility as a news source doubtful, as well as making sure they are appealing to a specific audience of people who believe the same beliefs that they are publishing. These papers are driven by the ideologies of the people in charge, and so if the people at the top have an ideological dislike of a certain group of people, this will be seen in their publications. The idea that the army needs to be sent in to stop migrants further pushes this stereotype of migrants being dangerous, as it makes it seem like they are ’invading’ or are coming into the country in a hostile manner, when we know that this is not the case.
This is an example of hegemony in effect, and the paper‘s know that to appeal to the audience they have built up using these ideologies they need to keep it up in order to keep their sales in a more old-fashioned, less relevant medium. These publications are allowed to get away with these blatantly xenophobic headlines because it is such a widespread belief, a ‘truth’ that people don‘t even flinch at because it is so commonplace in society because of its history in the media. This creates a vicious michael, as the media creates the stereotype and then the stereotype feeds into the media, and it would take a very brave newspaper to challenge this idea and dare to take on the status quo that this ideology has become in the media, and in wider society too.
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